Many physicians at one time or another have probably thought their jobs might be a lot easier if they had custom-made devices to help them perform procedures. For the past nine years, a class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been making some of these wishes reality, at least for doctors in the Boston area.

"Precision Machine Design" -- also known by its course number, 2.75 -- allows doctors to submit proposals for devices they would like to see developed, and, if their idea is selected, a team of about three to five students will design and build a proof of concept of what they’re looking for. Though not all of the technology does not get commercially produced or put into practice, it gives physicians a glimpse of the potential for future medical devices, as well as an opportunity to do research to inform the field of medical devices, which is becoming increasingly more high-tech.

Click on the image below to check out some of the projects.

A kidney cooler, developed in the 2011 Precision Machine Design class, can be used to cool a kidney with ice slush during minimally invasive partial nephrectomies. This enables longer working times during operations. (Source: Nevan C. Hanumara, MIT)

“Many physicians in the Boston area have pent-up desires,” Nevan C. Hanumara, a former student of the course who now co-teaches it as an MIT post doctoral associate, told Design News. “They are very good at what they do, and they recognize that they don’t have the tools to do as good a job as they would like to do.”

The course was developed in 2004. It was inspired by a conceptual design course in the MIT Sloan School of Management that was folded into a design-and-build engineering class taught in part by Professor Alex Slocum. Every spring since then Slocum and his class have been making a call for proposals to physicians in the Boston area through the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology, a nonprofit consortium of Boston teaching hospitals and universities. Physicians whose designs are chosen -- 12 to 15 -- then present their ideas before the class, and students get to select the ones they want to work on, of which there typically are nine.

“We don’t do team manipulation,” Hanumara told us. “If we pick properly with a wide array of projects, the students find something they are interested in.”

Each team then has a budget of about $3,000 to $5,000 and the duration of the course to design and fabricate the device. They are guided by Slocum and Hanumara, who act more as project managers then typical professors because of the time constraint and the hands-on nature of the course. They also work closely with the physicians who proposed the devices.

“The key thing is that everybody in the class has to be able to do the math, the analysis, the real dimension drawings,” as well as have the skills to machine the device and source materials for what they’re building, Slocum told us. “You really have only 12 weeks from concept to reality, and everybody who is involved in the class has to be able to do real in-the-weeds work. It’s a different model. There are a lot of good hands-on design classes… but we tend to be on the extreme end of producing real hardware.

Hi, Dave, thanks for your comment and for telling me about your class. It sounds great--something that benefits both the students and the community, giving the students hands-on practice in the real world. And I also like that it's open to anyone who wants to take it and learn how to develop these projects. I'll take a look at the information you provided.

I agree it is important to provide courses that exercise students knowledge in a practical way. This prpares them for the real world. Key elements of these courses are team-work, working closely with a "client", using an engineering design process, critical thinking, and communication (both written and oral).

Another example is the course I teach at Stanford - Perspectives in Assistive Technology - where students work on projects that benefit an individual with a disability or an older adult in the local community. Projects are "pitched" in class and come from researchers, family members, health care professionals, as well as people with disabilities or older adults. The projects represent real-world problems.

This is a ten-week course open to everyone, not just engineering students. Class sessions are filled with guest lecturers, field trips to local facilities, and an assistive technology faire.

Community members (several have disabilities) are encouraged to attend the class sessions and add to the in-class discussions.

I'm glad you enjoyed the post, bobjengr. It is always good to hear the perspective of someone in the industry as well. I think, too, this is just a more practical way to design things that customers in a particular market really need and it just makes sense to have this kind of program in place. I can't imagine why more universities and research institutes aren't doing it. I think it could not only benefit industries by giving professionals in them the products they want, but also save a lot of time and money.

I think the approach is excellent and should be duplicated as often as possible by university engineering departments. This will give the students "hands-on" experience and allow them to solve, or at least approach solving, real-world problems faced on a daily basis. At GE, this is what we called quality functional deployment (QFD). Taking customer "wants" and transferring them into specifications usable enough to produce an actual product. Great experience for an engineering student. Great post Elizabeth--very informative.

I couldn't agree more, CLMcDade. I like the idea that "everybody in the class has to be able to do the math, the analysis, the real dimension drwaings." It's nice to know that there's such practical application of knowledge outside the realm of the senior design project.

@Cabe: Huh? R&D spending on healthcare is much larger than R&D spending on smartphones. U.S. healthcare and life science companies spent $182 billion on R&D in 2012. That's not even counting government spending on healthcare R&D. That's just private sector spending.

Apple spent $3.4 billion on R&D in 2012, and smartphones are only part of that. Add in Microsoft ($9.8 billion) and Google ($5.2 billion), and that's still less than a tenth of healthcare R&D.

In the U.S., we spend nearly 18% of GDP ($8233 per person per year) on healthcare. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't spend that much on a smartphone.

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